using your digital camera to create vertical videos for Facebook or Instagram

see also:

• photography and camping main index page
• using your digital camera as a webcam

• the far majority of videos and movies are in landscape 16:9 aspect
• But what if you want to create portrait 9:16 vertical videos which are sometimes better suited for viewing IG or FB on smartphones?
• the easy part is shooting the vertical videos, just use your camera in portrait orientation and shoot the video and then open the file(s) on your computer for editing.

• if you wish to shoot for FB you only need 720p so if you shoot longer than 10 minutes in 1080 25p you made exceed your camera's “4Gb” file size limit which will then result in multiple files which will need to be merged - and this can be a pain if you don't have the right software to merge them (see below)!
• do a test video and make sure you have your audio levels optimised in camera - you don't want them too soft!

• when you open your video on the computer, you will find that it is in standard horizontal, landscape 16:9 view but now has your image rotated 90deg
• I tried many software options to convert this to vertical 9:16 aspect but most could not do this
• transforming using the freeware VLC Media Player
  • this is a great media player and it is free but it did take a bit to find how to do this and the latest version 3.0.10 in April 2020 seems to have a bug that keeps repeating the video conversion and you need to use Task Manager to shut it down
  • first you need to go to Tools: Effects and Filters : Video Effects: Geometry and then tick Transform and ensure it's option is “Rotate by 90 degrees”
  • now when you play your video it will play within VLC in the desired vertical orientation, but if you then save your video by using the Media: Convert/Save these settings will NOT be applied to your converted video!
  • you need to do one more convoluted, hidden step to ensure your transform is applied to your conversion:
    • go to Tools:Preferences:Interface Settings page
    • at bottom left tick All to display the Advanced Settings
    • open up the tree item Sout stream and then click on Transcode
    • then tick the “Video Transformation Filter” and hit Save
  • NOW, you can go to Media: Convert/Save and you will get your vertically oriented video in 9:16 as desired
• better still, use NHC Software's freeware VideoPad Video Editing module
  • as I discovered, this awesome software not only merged my files successfully when other apps couldn't but it has a very easy rotate option - just chose Video Effects then Rotate or Rotate & Flip and you are given a range of options

• again, I tried many software options and all of them failed to merge two identically specified video files into one - some like Microsoft Photo just refused to retain the audio track no matter what I did!
• even VLC Media Player command line options failed me
• I tried DVDVideoSoft's “Free Video Editor” of which I have the paid version but this will only edit one file, as with the TunesKit Video Cut and Merge software
• Finally, I solved it by downloading NHC Software's freeware VideoPad Video Editing module
  • even with this I had to ensure all the segments were selected in the Video Track area to get all the files to merge included in the output
  • this even allowed me to choose 720×1280 resolution for FB and select from a variety of compression options (although the estimated file size feature didn't seem to change when different compressions were chosen)
  • this software saved my day!
  • check out their Youtube tutorials on more handy tricks with their software https://www.nchsoftware.com/videopad/support.html